LONDON — Could the British government’s plan to borrow and spend its way out of a recession lead to a run on the pound?
George Osborne, the Conservative Party’s spokesman on such matters, warned of just such an outcome this month, and Peter Mandelson, the Labor government’s business secretary, accused him of being “reckless and irresponsible.”
In the last few days, Mr. Osborne again accused Prime Minister Gordon Brown of driving Britain toward bankruptcy, but he avoided any mention of what one of the biggest borrowing surges in British history might do to its already fragile currency.
All the same, a feeling is building that Mr. Osborne may have a point. The pound, already down more than 26 percent from its high of $2.11 a year ago, could fall further once the economy begins to feel the strain from the increased debt.
“Any economy with our level of borrowing and our deficit of trade should have one of the world’s weakest currencies, not the strongest,” said Peter K. Hargreaves, chief executive of Hargreaves Lansdown, an independent brokerage firm in Bristol. “We don’t make anything anymore, and our biggest export was the City of London, which is in disarray. We are in a very poor state.”
Mr. Hargreaves sees the pound falling to $1.25 — it was at $1.54 on Friday — and he has recently moved £20 million into United States Treasury bills and instruments denominated in, among other currencies, the Norwegian krone.
“I just don’t think this country understands how serious the problem is,” he said.
Britain has a deep, emotional connection with its currency, the world’s oldest still in use. Crashes, when they come — as they did in 1967, 1976 and 1992 — have been viewed as moments of wrenching national shame.
The pound’s buoyant decade under Mr. Brown’s predecessor, Tony Blair, came to be seen as a lush emblem of Britain’s financial and popular resurgence. Middle Eastern and Russian billionaires accumulated British assets, and American investment bankers, once happy to be paid in dollars, schemed to see how they might manage to secure their bonuses in pounds.
Now, unemployment is rising, house prices are falling and economic growth is a faraway hope. Britain is seen as having relied too much on volatile sectors like housing, finance and retail. The numbers paint a stark picture: Britain’s public debt is expected to double to more than £1 trillion by 2012 — or about 60 percent of its gross domestic product.
Still, when it comes to the currency — the ultimate barometer of an economy’s health and future prospects — few forecasters have predicted an outright collapse. In fact, after touching a recent low of $1.48, the pound has rallied, lifted by the government’s stimulus plan, which includes cuts in the sales tax and £3 billion in capital spending. Government officials said in the last week that the steep income tax increases built into the program, aimed at high earners, were there to assure currency markets that these high debt levels would not be permanent.
According to Bloomberg News, the average forecast by City economists for the pound at the end of 2009 is $1.62. It is $1.66 for 2010.
Of course, currency forecasting in the midst of a historic financial crisis is an imprecise art. And such estimates do not square with a growing pessimism about the pound’s future that can be readily heard from the salons of West London to the trading desks of investments banks, where a popular bet has become when, as opposed to if, the pound might hit parity with the dollar.
The last time sterling came close to parity was February 1985, when the currency dipped below $1.10, with Britain hobbled by labor unrest and a recession.
“Parity is not impossible,” said Theo Casey, an investment strategist at The Fleet Street Letter, a financial newsletter that has been forecasting the collapse of the pound since August. “We are this tiny island dependent on finance and housing. We are crashing and it will continue.”
His newsletter foresees a return to past sterling crises, most notoriously the one in 1976, when Britain had to seek a bailout from the International Monetary Fund. According to Mr. Casey, such dire prognostications have hit a chord: newsletter subscriptions have risen more than 30 percent since its call on sterling.
Willem H. Buiter, a political economist at the London School of Economics, points out in his widely read blog, Maverecon, that there are two factors in this crisis that were missing during previous sterling reversions.
The first is that the pound now floats freely, making it more vulnerable to the whims of speculators. The second is the added burden of a devastated banking sector.
These elements are joined by the one common cause of past currency panics: a bet made by currency speculators that the highly leveraged British state will become insolvent.
“A sterling crisis would not be something highly unusual, if your idea of the distant past is not the market trader’s last month,” Mr. Buiter wrote recently, voicing sympathy for Mr. Osborne’s warning that the Labor plan might ruin the pound.source: nytimes.com
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Fears That a Weakened British Pound May Grow Weaker
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Rory Vanucchi
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